


how to love your depressed lover

by alonso



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: Bipolar Disorder, Depression, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Near Future, it's in second person i'm so so sos osososososo sorry, sad boys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-15
Updated: 2014-05-15
Packaged: 2018-01-24 21:45:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1618121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alonso/pseuds/alonso
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>sometimes ian falls into a haze, an overwhelming sadness. you are there with him 'til the end of time.<br/>(or, mickey introspects and has more emotions than he ever thought possible.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	how to love your depressed lover

**Author's Note:**

> based on [this](http://five--a--day.tumblr.com/post/37728434696/how-to-love-your-depressed-lover) beautiful beautiful poem by dm riley, one of my all-time favorites.
> 
> set in the near future, ian still has not balanced out evenly on his meds and is affected by his bipolarity in waves. I'd like to also think that experiencing ian's manic depression secondhand would make mickey more of an introspective person because mickey just cares so so so so so much.

Ian sits on the window sill, his knees drawn up to his chest, his arms hugging them tightly. His eyes are red like he’d just been crying, but steely like his resolve was still barely clinging on, staring out past the grimy, scratched, fingerprinted window out into the gray, mute abyss of Chicago. 

You watch him from the doorframe and swallow thickly. You don’t know what to do when Ian was like this. You don’t. You don’t know what to expect, when to expect it, how to know if you are helping or hurting Ian more. Ian’s medication makes things a little more constant, but you have learned that you cannot erase a melancholy that runs straight to the bone. You can’t. You can only hide it, push it into a corner, appease it, hope that it doesn’t rear its ugly head. 

**

Two nights ago, Ian screamed at you. You can’t even remember what it was all about. You let him scream and you clenched and unclenched your fists to keep you from screaming back. It wasn’t a thing you did, resist the urge to fight back. In your house, fighting back was the bare minimum, you fight back and destroy and win. But in this house, in this shitty little apartment that you’ve claimed as yours and Ian’s, you shut the fuck up and remember how much you have already hurt the man standing in front of you, who is shouting until his face turns as red as his hair. 

You do remember. You close your eyes and you hear it: “I shouldn’t have changed you. If you like yourself the way you are so goddamn much, so fucking unaffectionate, unsentimental, unloving, then you should stay like that. Am I fucking joking? I shouldn’t have bothered to make you different. Milkoviches don’t fucking change like that. Listen, Mickey. I’m lonely and fucked up enough, I don’t need your pity to keep me warm at night.”

But last night, you kissed every inch of him, spanning your hands across the expanse of his chest, drifting your fingers over his pale, freckled skin like it was a secret, like you were stepping outside of yourself into someone you only thought you could be in dreams. Your hands dug into his hipbone, a gentle press, an anchor. Your fingertips were buzzing, shaking as you stroked Ian’s cheekbones with your thumb, brushed the smudges of his eyebrows, traced over the bow of his lips, made constellations with his freckles. 

You pressed kisses carefully to his bellybutton, his shoulder, his neck, his wrist. Each kiss meant: you’re not alone. please don’t be lonely. you are everything. 

You feel Ian shaking, his eyes jammed shut, his teeth biting down on his lip, hard. He’s trembling and you set his head on your chest, stroking your hands through his hair like you would gentle a horse, a towering, docile steed. You don’t have any words. You usually don’t. He understands. 

“I’m sorry,” Ian murmurs, almost a whisper, half a breath. You don’t have to think before responding. 

“I’m right here.” 

**

You thought, the next morning, that he would be a little bit okay. A little bit. Your small kingdom, your shared steps forward. But when you wake up, Ian is sitting up, his feet on the carpet, his back hunched over like a tree bending toward water. He is staring at the floor.

His hands are moving in his lap, wringing and unwringing and flexing and unflexing and gripping and ungripping. You want to still them. You reach out to touch him and he flinches away, just a centimeter. You withdraw; you understand. 

“Fuck,” he breathes out. “Fuck.” You wait, you know there’s more. “There’s a fucking knot, Mickey. I don’t think you can ever untie it.” He breathes in and out, shallow breaths, and you don’t know what to say again. 

“Hey. Ian, it’s okay, it’s okay it’s okay it’s okay. Come back to bed, don’t...don’t go away again.”

Ian just half-shakes his head, he doesn’t look at you, he sits at the window. 

**

You look into his eyes and they’re not the same. They’re not the same eyes that see through your shitty façade, the one that’s gleefully crumbling every day you wake up next to him, the eyes that have always seen you as more than some hopeless fucking thug from a shitty family with a shitty past, present, and future. 

You look into his eyes on days like this, and the “vacancy” sign flashes like an mocking neon warning. Ian’s not here today, Ian’s resting inside, Ian will be back soon. You thread your fingers gently through his hair, he closes his eyes, and you think that you should file a missing persons report. “Excuse me, detective, yes, my...uh...Ian, he’s gone. He’s sleeping in our bed but I can’t fucking find him. You’re an expert at this shit, give me a clue, tell me how to do it, goddamn it.” 

You want to scream and punch walls and mirrors and randomly destroy things with Ian right next to you, his fiery red, red passion blazing in his eyes and in his beautiful maniacal grin. You want to destroy this thing, this illness, Monica, Frank, Lip, the Army, the perverts, the rapists, the pedophiles, yourself. Anyone who hurt him. 

You look at at the way he sleeps on days like this, his arms crossed tightly to his chest, his legs bunched up, his body facing the wall. 

You don’t know how the fuck you can begin to say sorry. And you know that Ian will tell you that there’s no need for apologizing, because his heart is bigger than the volcano of fears you used to carry around with you, but every time he says that, your mind flashes to images of Ian sprawled on the gravel, bleeding from his mouth at your hand, and you walking away with a dead weight inside of you. And you know that sorry can’t begin to cut it. But you know that laying right there in bed next to him is a start. 

**

You still smoke, but you try not to drink, on days like this. You just lay in bed with Ian, maybe he’ll wander, but he always returns. You drag the cigarette to your mouth and breathe in the poison, trying to feel the ubiquitous poison in Ian’s lungs. 

You turn off the lights and crawl into bed. Ian finally faces you, but his eyes are closed tight and his hands are tucked into his chest. You face him also, feeling small and powerless against everything. 

You lay like that for hours. In the thick of the night, Ian opens his eyes and scoots closer. He’s telling you things. You listen; you’re pretty good at it. 

“I’m so fucking fucked up, Mick. I don’t want to be like this. I don’t know how to even explain it.”

“It’s like a burning, right in the bottom of my feet, and it moves up and down and rests in my chest like a lump of steel. And some days I don’t feel it at all, I feel like the lead is gone, and I can float like a fucking bird and love you and not feel anything except you and you and you.” A bitter laugh. 

“I wish I could be like that every day, Mick.”

“And then, on days like today, I just feel like the lead has melded into every one of my bones, and I can’t escape it. I can’t escape anything. I can’t escape it at all.” 

“I fucked myself up, my life, my heart, my brain, and now I’m fucking you up too.”

You move so close to Ian that you think you’ll wake up buried inside his chest, trying to dig out the lead in his bones. You press your lips against his perfect heart, his perfect brain, and you don’t say a goddamn thing.

**  
Ian moves back to the window sill the next morning, and you come sit next to him. Your hand covers his and squeezes. You’re both looking out the same grimy window. The sun peeks out, brazenly, confidently, reassuringly from behind the clouds. Ian moves closer to you, presses his leg up against yours fully, hip to knee, and nuzzles his head on your shoulder. 

He squeezes your hand and you think that you can get used to this pattern, these ups and downs, as long as Ian promises to always come back to you again, just like this.


End file.
